Informing and Advancing Effective Policy

Why Are Rich, White Girls Struggling in Math?

In recent years, the common wisdom has been that girls are dominating when it comes to academic achievement. In reading in particular, girls have consistently outperformed boys. Some studies have also found that in a typical U.S. school district, girls have all but caught up in math—a subject in which they had historically underperformed and from which they’d been discouraged thanks to persistent stereotypes about their academic interests. Take away the burden of challenging stereotypes and discriminatory beliefs and practices, the thinking goes, and girls will do just as well as boys in the STEM fields.

But now, a new study by a team of researchers led by the Stanford education professor Sean Reardon finds that girls’ dominance in school isn’t the case across demographics. Yes, the study confirms: Overall, in the average U.S. school district, girls and boys are performing about the same in math. But the study finds that in communities in which most families are affluent and white, and in which adult men far outearn women in income, girls continue to lag behind their male peers in math achievement. In some of these districts, boys on average outperformed girls in math by two-fifths of a grade level.

Mentioned Publications

In the first systematic study of gender achievement gaps in U.S. school districts, we estimate male-female test score gaps in math and English Language Arts (ELA) for nearly 10,000 school districts in the U.S. We use state accountability test data from third through eighth grade students in the 2008-09 through 2014-15 school years. The average school district in our sample has no gender achievement gap in math, but a gap of roughly 0.23 standard deviations in ELA that favors girls. Both math and ELA gender achievement gaps vary among school districts and are positively correlated – some districts have more male-favoring gaps and some more female-favoring gaps. We find that math gaps tend to favor males more in socioeconomically advantaged school districts and in districts with larger gender disparities in adult socioeconomic status. These two variables explain about one fifth of the variation in the math gaps. However, we find little or no association between the ELA gender gap and either socioeconomic variable, and we explain virtually none of the geographic variation in ELA gaps.

To download a data file with the gender achievement gap estimates produced in this paper, please click here to sign the data use agreement. Upon signing, you will be redirected to the Stanford Education Data Archive where you can download the data file from this paper.

This map displays Empirical Bayes estimates of the average achievement gaps in math and English language arts in nearly 10,000 U.S. public school districts. A gap of zero indicates that there is no achievement gap in that district. Negative gaps (shown in orange) indicate that female students score higher on average than male students in the district; positive achievement gaps (shown in blue) indicate that male students score higher on average than female students in the district. The gaps displayed are in standard deviation units; for reference, a third of a standard deviation gap is approximately a one grade level difference.